About
Kia ora, I'm Matt
I'm a Dad who set out to give my kids the best start at school, found the information scattered everywhere, and ended up building the tool I wish I'd had.
Where it began
The Moment It Started
When our first son, Micah, was about three, my wife and I started thinking properly about school. We'd moved from Auckland up to Whangārei a few years earlier and bought a home, so we were already settled and already in-zone for a school. Being fairly new to the area, we didn't have a lot of local knowledge to lean on. But the more I dug into it, the more I realised this wasn't really a newcomer problem at all. So much changes between your own school days and the day your kids start that even people who grew up in a place can find the ground has shifted under them. The decile you remember is gone, schools change, zones get redrawn. So we started asking what our options really were across town, whether being zoned for a better school was worth moving for, and which schools were even the good ones now.
We did it the way our own parents would have. Find the decile, start there. But when we went looking, scrolling to the bottom of property listings and typing addresses into the Ministry of Education zone map one at a time, the decile was gone. In its place was an Equity Index number that meant nothing to me as a parent. I knew it was never meant to be a score of how good a school was, but it didn't give me anything I could actually use. It was just another confusing data point.
This wasn't idle curiosity either. Moving across town for a school meant a house decision, with real money on the line. We spent evening after evening waiting for listings to come up, checking zones, wondering about the commute, trying to work out whether a place was in-zone for a good school and something we could actually afford, all at the same time. There was no way to hold all of that in one place for every address we looked at. It was that Equity Index number that finally did it for me. I sat there thinking there had to be a kinder, more family-first way to make this decision, and that I might be the one to pull it together.
Who I am
Before BoundFor
My background has taken a few turns to get here. I went to school on Auckland's North Shore and spent a year living in Brazil along the way, so I've been around a fair range of places and people over the years, and all of it has fed into where I am today. After that I studied science at university, worked in data analysis for a good while, taught English across a few schools in Japan, and I've spent a lot of years since working inside a large New Zealand company. Different as those all sound, the same thing has followed me through them. I've always ended up taking information that's confusing, or spread across too many places, and working it into something a person can actually understand and use. I've built a "bring it all together" tool before too, a proof of concept for financial information that ran for a while, so making sense of messy data is familiar ground for me.
Mostly though, I'm building this as a parent. I grew up in New Zealand, my family are Kiwis, and I love this country. My wife and I have two children with a third due in September, so this is my decision as much as anyone's. I'm my own first user, solving my own problem before anyone else's. I also believe every kid and every family deserves a fair shot at doing what's best for them, whatever that looks like for them. That belief is where the name comes from. Our kids are all bound for great things, and BoundFor is my way of helping more families get them there.
How it works
What BoundFor Does for You
Everything on BoundFor is built on official government sources — the Ministry of Education, ERO, and NZQA — with our sources and processing explained on our methodology page. You get the real numbers, not my spin on them.
No school pays to be on BoundFor, or to look better than the one next to it. What one family sees, every family sees.
BoundFor doesn't publish league tables or crown a "best" school. It lays everything out clearly and leaves the choice with you, because every family weighs things differently.
Find the right school for your family
Search every New Zealand school by zone, type, and location — then build a personalised report.